Shame on us for treatment of veterans

As of March 18, at the Winston-Salem Veterans Affairs office, where most North Carolina veterans' benefits claims are processed, it took an average of 353 days for a claim to be resolved.

That's almost a year, a long time for someone suffering from a life-altering injury. It's plenty long enough for someone with no income to go bankrupt, to become homeless or to commit suicide, as media reports show some have done.

The numbers for the 58 regional VA offices indicate uneven treatment but show that almost everywhere veterans are waiting an inordinate time to have their claims processed, a nationwide average of 273 days, according to Aaron Glantz, a reporter with the Center for Investigative Reporting who has spent nearly a year researching and reporting on the backlog.

"This is primarily disability claims that we are talking about," Glantz said during an NPR interview. "These are people that have been to war. ... They come home and they are wounded, so they can't work so they file a disability claim."

The VA faces almost 900,000 pending claims, more than 600,000 of which have been waiting for more than 125 days, Glantz reports. Added to this are stories of claims lost and mishandled and of wait times of up to four years for appeals to be processed.

Such treatment compounds veterans' suffering by demonstrating a hurtful indifference to the sacrifice they have made.

With 49,363 pending claims, the second-highest number among the regional offices, Winston-Salem has 34,327 claims that have been waiting for more than 125 days. In August, the VA inspector general reported that the office had so many backlogged claims stacked on file cabinets and the floor that the structural integrity of the building was in danger of being compromised. Floors were bowing under the excess weight.

In January, the VA announced that 18 regional offices, including Winston-Salem, were adopting a new Web-based system. But, according to Glantz, despite a four-year, $537 million computerization effort, the system is full of bugs, and 97 percent of claims remain on paper.

The effort to implement this new system comes amid a tsunami of new claims, the highest numbers in the history of the VA, Allison Hickey, VA undersecretary for benefits, said in testimony before a congressional committee on Wednesday.

The VA completed more than 1 million claims per year in fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012, but couldn't keep pace with the number received, 1.2 million in 2010, 1.3 million in 2011 and 1.08 in 2012, Hickey testified.

The number of claims is growing in part because the VA has expanded benefits to Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange. In addition, as many as 45 percent of veterans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan are seeking VA compensation for war-related wounds, the highest rate in history.

Glantz reports that the number of veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits grew from 11,000 in 2009, the first year of President Obama's presidency, to 245,000 in December.

"President Obama came in, and he made promises of eliminating this backlog, and he had a plan to eliminate the backlog, and he implemented the very steps he talked about ... but here we are five years later, and it has simply not worked for veterans," Glantz told NPR.

Ten years ago, when the Iraq War began, policymakers failed to anticipate how long the war would last or to plan for the number of wounded veterans who would return, so there's plenty of blame to go around. But President Obama took ownership of the problem when he promised to fix it.

America's military veterans gave years of their lives and many times their health or life itself in the service of their country. No matter the politics of the wars they were deployed to fight, they answered the call of the lawmakers we, the American people chose, and were willing to put themselves in harm's way to do what those lawmakers believed was necessary to keep the rest of us secure.

In return, their country made a sacred pledge to provide them with certain benefits. It's a pledge no economic downturn, no debt or budgetary crisis and no partisan finger-pointing can absolve. To allow some to die and to put others through months and sometimes years of hell before they realize those promised benefits is a shameful and immoral betrayal.

The pressure from the American public should be relentless until the President and Congress marshal the will and provide the leadership and resources to get America's military veterans' claims accurately processed in a timely manner.

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Shame on us for treatment of veterans

As of March 18, at the Winston-Salem Veterans Affairs office, where most North Carolina veterans' benefits claims are processed, it took an average of 353 days for a claim to be resolved.